Noir (15 page)

“Which would mean—” McNihil spoke his next thoughts aloud. “That they connected him over. Harrisch and his buddies at the company. They set Travelt up.”

“Possibly.”

He studied his dead wife, as though he could see the workings behind her eyes. “You don’t know?”

“If I did,” she said, “I’d tell you.”

“Would you really?” McNihil brushed his hand across the cover of one of the romance novels on the table. “Considering … what it would mean …” The bare-chested adventurer, with flowing blond hair as long as that of the brunette temptress in his arms, had collapsed with her skeletal form across the oil-stained beach. The mingled, graying strands floated like seaweed in the tired waves. McNihil looked up at his wife. “Because if they set
him
up … one of their own …”

“They’d be just as happy to set you up.” The idea didn’t seem to have any emotional impact on her, one way or the other.” For whatever reasons they might have.”

I knew
, thought McNihil,
I didn’t like that asshole
. The image of Harrisch’s smiling face floated by on the screen inside his head. There’d been an instinctive aversion on his part toward the exec, more than McNihil usually felt when dealing with high-level corporate types. The one lying on the floor, looking up with empty eyes, was his notion of the only good executive type. Too bad that Harrisch didn’t fit—at least, not yet—that terminal description as well. Loathing for the man had been the main reason that McNihil had turned down any job offer. He could’ve used the money, might even have enjoyed finding out how the late Travelt got stiffed, but without even reasoning out why, he’d let the rising of his stomach up into his throat tell him that he’d wanted nothing to do with the whole creepy setup.

And now, what his dead wife had just told him—that confirmed the wisdom of his initial reaction.

“You were right,” she said. “From the beginning. Sometimes you are, you know. You don’t need me to tell you everything.”

“No … I suppose not.” The business with Harrisch and the corpse, all of which he’d now been pressured into making his own business, faded from his thoughts for a moment. He studied his dead wife, looking at her with that same slow contemplation as when, in the middle of the night, back when she’d still been alive, he would raise himself up on one elbow in the bed they’d shared then, and in the muted darkness watch her sleeping. The rise of her breasts against the sheets, the draw and exhale at her slightly parted lips, the flutter of her dark eyelashes as some unshared dream traced her vision … that was all a long time ago. A long time, and another world away. Everything about her now was as still as the empty bed he looked back at every night, the one perpetual night, from the door of the room in which he tried to sleep.

Death hadn’t been as hard on her, as far as looks were concerned, as it had been for the slowly decaying scavengers out in this territory’s cold fields. The transition had perhaps leaned her down, lost her the few pounds she hadn’t really needed to lose when alive; now she had both a fashion-model thinness and pallor, even to the dark, bruised-looking eye sockets. Her hair had been untouched by gray; it fell black as he remembered, past her shoulders, to that place along her back where he still had a tactile memory of his hand resting. Death, at least in the sense of physical beauty, had done her some good; he knew she had a certain vanity about that. She’d looked worse in the hospital, when she’d been dying, making the change from one state of being to another; that’d been the roughest, on both of them. And the most corrosive of feeling: he might not have done what he’d wound up doing, gotten into the betrayal mode so heavily.
That was where I connected up
, thought McNihil as he gazed at his dead wife.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She extracted another cigarette from the pack on the table. “You got something out of it. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

Moments like this, when she made little remarks so close to the bone, he could almost hate her. The other side of the guilt equation, the handle she had on his soul: he had profited by her death, in more ways than one.
She doesn’t have to remind me
, thought McNihil bitterly. That
was what had enabled him to make his place in the Collection Agency, scrabble his way up the ranks of the asp-heads. It was a competitive field, in which a career could stall out from either a lack of guts or the right equipment. The agency itself only paid for the essentials, thus keeping its basic operating costs down, passing on the bulk of the royalties to its clients, the artists and content creators. To get the plum assignments, which was where the excitement was, and the resultant bounties and bonuses—small, but they added up eventually—a hustling young asp-head had to trick himself out with some expensive goodies, paid for from his own pocket. There was a valve at the center of his head, the installation of which hadn’t come cheap.

And had been worth it; not all the pirate types that he’d wound up dealing with had been candy-ass pushover types. Some serious bad people got into copyright violation, theft of intellectual property, on-wire counterfeiting and password-forgery scams, ID shadowing and third-party bucket relays. Operations of that sort, whether it was a fly-by-night anonymous remailer setting up shop in the New Guinea jungles or a Fortune 500 heavyweight trying to muscle in on just a little bit of a competitor’s crypt’d-up patents, took substantial capital investments to get up and running. People like that, with that kind of money sunk into their illegal enterprises, and with the kind of payoff they were hoping for in mind, didn’t enjoy the Collection Agency fouling up their plans. An asp-head, the visible embodiment of the agency, was in for a major—and final—ass-kicking if he couldn’t take care of himself. Which happened sometimes, the result being a small box arriving at the agency headquarters, a box that leaked from the bottom and smelled like the dumpsker behind a butcher shop by the time it got opened and the pieces identified for a proper burial. McNihil, just starting with the agency and totally green, had been in on the tail end of the raids on the last Guangzhou holdouts, deep inside the Guangdong FEZ in the Chinese mainland—data forgery, mastering and distribution facilities so entrenched that they had their own military, way beyond Beijing control. A lot of older asp-heads had gone home in crates before that had been wrapped up; McNihil owed at least part of his rise in the agency to the holes that had been shot through the ranks above him. Also his caution, and his more-than-willingness to keep his chops and equipment up-to-date. But that cost money.

“The good things in life always do,” said the dead woman sitting
across from him. “That’s the difference between life and death. When you’re the way I am … prices really don’t matter anymore.”

“How the hell should I know?” McNihil didn’t feel like smiling back at her. “I’m not dead yet. I’m trying to avoid that.”

“Because you’re smart. Smarter than I was, at any rate.” She contemplated the unlit cigarette in her hand. “Inasmuch as I trusted you.”

Which she shouldn’t have.
For both our sakes
, thought McNihil. He supposed he could’ve quit the Collection Agency, gotten some other job where the consequences for failure weren’t quite so grim. Or if he had to stick it out as an asp-head, for whatever reasons he carried around in the dark rooms of his head and heart, he could’ve found some other way to finance the upward motion of his career there. Some other way besides spending the insurance payout that fell into his hands upon his wife’s death. The payout that would have otherwise wiped off her indeadted status and bought her a nice, quiet resting place in the ground or a crematory urn.

“Oh, I would’ve wanted the cremation.” His dead wife nodded as she reached for a book of matches. “Definitely. Even before finding out what I know now. About what happens after things die.” She lit the cigarette. “It’s so much cleaner.”

It was more or less the same conversation they wound up having every time he came down here. Not so much because she wanted to talk about these things—from the beginning, she had displayed a casual acceptance about her transformed condition that had left him somewhat stunned and mystified, until he’d figured out why she was doing it. All the better to twist the knife inside him. Which was the same reason McNihil thought and talked about these things. As the ancient sage had said,
As long as you use a knife, there’s still some love left
. It just depended on whether you used the knife on yourself or not.

That was the trouble with death and money combined. They could be either evil or innocuous on their own, but when they were wrapped up together, when they slept in the same coldly burning bed, that was when things got messy and weird.

“Connect this,” said McNihil. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” Some other time, when he wasn’t being leaned on by Harrisch and his crew, he could dig the past up from its unsilent grave, and dissect with his dead wife how he’d screwed her over, spent the insurance payout on his asp-head gear, and somehow never got far enough ahead on his
Collection Agency salary and bonuses to pay off her living debts and stick her ashes in that little jar she coveted for her final residence. “Right now,” he said aloud, “I’ve got other things on my mind.”

“Sure.” His dead wife let the new cigarette burn, without bringing it to her pale lips. “You came here for advice. Analysis of the situation you’re in. People have been calling on the dead for these services, for a long time now. Before, though, they usually didn’t get any answers.”

“Lucky for them.” A grim mood had descended upon McNihil. It was easier to deal with guilt and the past than the present situation. He knew where he was with the past.

“Didn’t I tell you enough? You know more than when you came here.” His dead wife shrugged, cigarette held aloft. “I can’t figure out everything for you. Even if I could … why should I?”

She dealt in fragments, he knew, fragmentary info, fragmentary answers. The scraps and pieces that came drifting on hidden, subterranean currents into the dead territory. Proof that she was on a much higher functioning level than the scavengers he’d spotted so many times from the train windows. Her existence, this little bubble of ersatz bourgeois comfort amidst the rubble and decay, was financed from her earnings as an analyst of discarded data banks, medical records, consumer surveys of products that had been taken off the market decades ago, bins full of old credit-card receipts; all the informational flotsam that washed up on this terminal shore. A couple of small-time research services, including one university sociology/ethnobiology department, kept her and a few dead colleagues on minuscule retainers and piece-work schedules. That brought in enough to pay the interest on her debts and even chip away a little on the principal amounts. At the rate she was going, sometime in the next century she might be able to keep her long-delayed appointment at the crematorium.

“Why should you?” An old question. “Maybe just because you love me. Still.”

“Do I?” Her dark, empty eyes regarded him.

“Maybe.” His turn to shrug. “You tell me.”

Her gaze shifted to the spark at the tip of the cigarette. “That’s one of the things I’m not ever going to tell you.” A speck of ash touched her wrist, then drifted the rest of the way down to the table. “It’d be just too easy on you.”

“Fine,” said McNihil. “I’m way beyond needing anyone to be that
kind. So why don’t you just tell me instead, something about what I came down here to find out?”

“These people you’re dealing with? What more do you need to know?” The smoke drew a smudged gray line beside her face. “You know enough to be cautious.”

“I knew that
before
I came down here.” He couldn’t tell if she was jerking him around or not. Sometimes, from the random backwash of information into the dead territory, she extracted worthwhile answers; other times, not. The luck of the draw. “I could use something a little more practical. Something that would help save my ass.”

“Is that all?” His dead wife smiled behind the cigarette. “Might be rather late for that. Like I said. They’ve been scheming on you for a while.”

“Then I’ll have to take my chances. I don’t have anything to lose.”

“Fine.” She set the cigarette down on the edge of the table, inside a row of small burn marks. Unsmiling, she leaned toward him. “You want something more? Something you can use? I’ll tell you right now. What you probably know already, because if you don’t, you’re too stupid to live.” Her voice grated harsh, as though sand were caught in her corded throat. “It’s not that guy Harrisch and the rest of those corporate types that you have to worry about. They’re nothing. They’ve got their plans for you—there’s something they want from you, something different from what they’ve said—but you might be able to handle that. You’ve got a chance. But where you’re connected—and you are; you know that, don’t you?—that’s nothing much to do with them. It’s what they want you to get involved in. That’s the problem for you. Where they want you to go.” She picked up the cigarette again and held it aloft. When she spoke again, it was in a quieter, scarier voice. “And who’s waiting for you there.”

It took a few moments before McNihil was able to ask the next question. “And who’s that? Who’s waiting?”

“Come on.” His dead wife shook her head in mock exasperation. “You know perfectly well. The same thing that’s always been your downfall. You’re just one of those guys who’s cursed by women. It wasn’t just me that you have problems with. There’s always some other woman that you have to deal with, that you
can’t
deal with. One that decides your fate. And you know who it is.”

“You mean …” McNihil frowned, trying to puzzle out her words.
“There’s one that’s been tailing me around; a young one. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Is that the one you’re talking about?”

“For Christ’s connecting sake.” Genuine anger flashed from his wife’s deep-socketed eyes. “Stop messing around. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If you want to pull your ass out of the fire, you’d better get your mind straight. For once. I don’t know anything about some ‘young one.’” The anger darkened, as though transmuting for a moment into sexual jealousy, an emotion that even death hadn’t managed to render out of her. “You idiot. God knows what you’re imagining now.” She managed an actual draw on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into her inert lungs, then exhaling a dragonish cloud. “You know who it is. The same one as before. The same one who screwed you over as badly as you did to me.” The tobacco haze slowly dispersed in the airless room. “It’s Verrity. It’s always been her.”